I had a girlfriend with a lovely body & lively mind who once told me--just in passing I thought back then--that she had studied belly-dance.  Although she & I performed all kinds of arabesques & other kinds of contortions together, somehow I never had the wit--or perhaps the courage!--to ask her to dance for me solo. So that I think I understand why today--so many years later--whenever I see a movie or a tv show or even a poster with a belly dancer in it, I feel devastated by a sense of loss.

*

“I am the blindfolded night-watchman, I am a citizen of darkness wandered too far from the land of nod.  You are the invisible beautiful blue whale floating every day through the noonday sky. In other words, I admire you from a distance which cannot easily be measured.” The boy finished his onstage recitation & sat down behind a pillar in auditorium. He had delivered his words while looking directly at his brand new English teacher, who was pretty & sitting in the front row. He wondered if anyone had noticed. A wise man once wrote: “Attractive older women invariably disorient ambitious young orators.”

*

No doubt there’s a particularly advanced, particularly elevated  state of mind which allows one to see that the teenage kid in the rave-club happily twirling her glo-stick & swiveling her hips & shaking it up from head to foot, & the frail, quivering old lady already semaphoring symptoms of shock even before being wheeled into the pre-op room in the hospital, are one & the same. But even if one hasn't achieved so lofty a state of mind as yet, even from a distance one can tell that such a way of looking at things could eventually make one feel terribly, terribly tender & sad….

                       (2006)